Piracy on the Nintendo DS was a relatively easy and cheap affair. All you needed was access to an R4 cartridge and a few torrents, and you could amass hundreds of games for less than the cost of one. Nintendo was understandably not happy with the situation and decided to take legal action as well as updating its hardware in a bid to curb the piracy.

Even with the updates and legal action, the R4 cart lives on, but Nintendo has now scored a major victory by helping to get them banned completely in the company’s home territory of Japan.

It’s actually the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry that has imposed a ban on importing the cartridges, but Nintendo is behind the push to make this happen. The carts were already banned from sale in Japan, but not import, meaning they could still flood the market just not through official retail channels. Now they are completely blocked.

This may be good news for Nintendo and the continued sales of both official DS and 3DS titles, but the R4 carts did have another purpose: homebrew game development. They allowed unofficial games created for Nintendo devices to be tested on actual hardware. With this total ban, that also becomes a lot harder to do.